When I wrote my earlier entry on writing and writer’s block, I had no idea what was coming, or that I would experience actual writer’s block myself for the very first time. I have learned that things are much more nuanced than what I described.
I had never experienced actual writer’s block before, and the reason is that my focus has been on non-fiction and not fiction. Fiction engages some different skills and relies much more on imagination and creativity. You are not writing about what is happening in the world, you are creating the world. When the whole world is turning nightmarish and dystopian, I discovered that it was difficult for me to be creative and create a different dystopian world, one that might not even reflect an actual possible future.
I stopped writing the book, and stopped writing this blog. I was just under too much stress, and both my wife and I hit creative walls. Yes, I continued to write, and made a great deal of progress on my non-fiction book, but the constant flow of ideas I needed for a science fiction story just were not coming.
To be fair, this was more stress than I had ever been under before, and it lasted over a year. We were all suffering under the worst pandemic in a hundred years, and then the leader of our nation decided to just walk away from the problem and ignore it. That led to exactly what you would expect, an explosion of cases and many more deaths. People I knew began to die. It all became very real. Because of my wife’s work with Ceders Sinai, one of the top hospitals in the nation, we both saw early exactly what was coming, although once we hit 4,000 deaths a day in the U.S., that did exceed what seemed like my overly dramatic expectations.
As awful as that was (and things are better but still pretty bad), there was much more. My beloved state of California was burning to the ground. It was the worst year for fires in California history. There were nearly 1,000 different fires, burning 4.4 million acres and over 10,000 buildings burned. California recorded the first “gigafire” in California, which is a single fire that burns over a million acres. Actual fire tornadoes became a thing.
Every year in October we go up into the mountains to Oak Glen to visit Los Rios Rancho. Part of it has been converted into a nature preserve, and the rest is devoted to growing apples. We go every year to get the amazing fresh pressed cider. We have been doing this almost our entire lives. We knew they were open, but also that there had been fires nearby. We were stunned at the devastation as we drove closer. Everything for as far as you could see was black. The little town of Oak Glen had been saved, a spot of green amid the blackened trees.
As we turned into the Rancho, we felt disoriented. Where was the main building? It was a hundred year old barn that had been converted into a store and restaurant. As we got closer, we could see that all that was left was a concrete slab. After narrowly surviving two fires that year, apparently a sparking transformer set off a blaze destroying their buildings. They had a tent set up to sell cider and apples, albeit at a premium price. Our attempt to do something normal failed. We felt worse after going.
With the pandemic, there was nowhere to go, and it was often so smokey you could not even go outdoors. Eventually, the smoke cleared and the Covid numbers came down enough that they opened up outdoor dining. We were very careful, taking our time to scope out the places that seemed the safest. By the time we had it figured out, the numbers went up dramatically and the restaurants were shut down again except for take out. We really miss going to restaurants.
Also adding to the stress was the fact that Belle did not have a regular job. Yes, she was working for a great place. Unfortunately, it was a temp job, and she could lose it at any moment. Rising Covid numbers gave her more job security, but that was a temporary and a very terrible way to have a little job security. The things that made her job more secure was the thing making us less personally secure.
While she was working, all I had was writing. I wound up in the hospital with severe sepsis. It was the last place I wanted to be. Belle could not come in and see me, and I was in a private room and felt very isolated.
There was so much more horrible in 2020. Australia nearly burned to the ground, suffering much worse than we did in California. There were devastating floods in Indonesia, riots in Delhi, a volcano eruption in the Philippines, the shocking death of basketball legend Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash, hundreds of billions of locusts swarmed East Africa, several large earthquakes around the world, all during the worst pandemic in a hundred years. It was an Apocalyptic year.
New Year’s Eve added one more stresser. Our cat Leeloo came into the living room with blood all over her face. At first we though maybe she had attacked a rodent or other small animal. The other cat was with us, so we knew she was fine. It became quickly apparent that the blood was Leeloo’s. A fifty cent sized piece of her face was furless and raw.
How this happened was a mystery. She is an indoor car. Stranger still, it was a perfectly circular wound. The fur around it looked cut, not ripped. Inside the circle there was just raw bloody skin and no fur at all. We decided not to try to take her to a vet near midnight on New Year’s Eve during a pandemic. We cleaned her wounds and she did not seem in a lot distress.
It turned out to be ringworm, which is not a worm at all but a fungal infection. We had never dealt with it before. It is easily treated, now that we know what it is.
The shots are coming. We have a new President who has the advantage of years of experience and not being insane. Things are looking promising for the first time in a long time. I hope to get back to writing the novel very soon.